Bacon to lead improvements in Chula Vista

Maximum efficiency still the goal for new deputy city manager

CHULA VISTA  Chula Vista’s Assistant City Manager Scott Tulloch retires next month, but not before he helps reorganize the leadership team at City Hall to make sure the city’s new lean operations don’t slip back into the way things used to be done.

New Deputy City Manager Kelley Bacon is taking the lead to ensure the culture change that city leaders have officially dubbed “continuous improvement” sticks.

Bacon, who has served for the last year as director of both human resources and information technology, will now also serve as a strategic leader for the city’s recreation, library and animal control departments. The existing directors and assistant directors will report to her. She is also now the city’s lead negotiator.

Bacon said the days since she took on her new role Jan. 1 have been “exceedingly busy,” but that she sees the shift as a tremendous opportunity.

“I’ll be providing the high-level managerial policy direction, strategic and administrative direction to the departments assigned to me, and then assisting in planning and directing administrative activities,” she explained.

Her main role, though, will be ensuring that Chula Vista stays true to its mission of operating with maximum efficiency as it begins to recover financially and add back positions that were eliminated during the last several years of bleakonomics.

The city has laid off 320 employees since 2007 and consolidated several departments, facts that leaders share with a mixture of pride and regret.

Pride because, they say, it was the fiscally responsible thing to do, and by increasing its efficiency the city has continued to provide most services with one of the leanest work forces among other cities its size. Regret, because there are divisions where layoffs really hurt operations, they say. And while they have asked increasingly more of the remaining employees, they acknowledge that municipal workers have not received a pay increase in years.

“There’s an adage, ‘Don’t waste a good crisis,’ and that’s partly what has happened here,” Tulloch said. “It gave us this impetus to look at a different way of doing business, and what we’ve chosen is this idea of a lean organization that pursues continuous improvement.”

But now it’s time to add back, he said, and Bacon will be in charge of making sure the adding is done in keeping with the spirit of continuous improvement. Her own track record is a microcosm of continuous improvement principles: She co-led the negotiations that resulted in reforming the city’s pension contributions, and also was instrumental in automating payroll, training, hiring and benefits.

“We’re trying to have a leaner staff, make sure employees are well-educated, well-trained, moving forward efficiently and making sure we compensate them fairly,” Bacon said.

Part of her strategy for the future may involve restoring some positions, but she explained that the organizational structure may never look the way it used to.

“We have already had large numbers of layoffs in the last five years, and we believe that in some areas we’ve cut too deeply, but we’re not just going to throw money at it,” she explained. “We’re looking at every step of the way what we’re doing, and really prioritizing the needs of the community, where we’ll add back positions.”

That may require some out-of-the-box thinking, of the variety that has produced an entirely new structure for management-level leaders. Bacon’s position and responsibilities are dramatically different from those of any deputy before her. Meanwhile Chula Vista’s other assistant city manager, Gary Halbert, will also take a step back from day-to-day operations and provide strategic leadership for the finance, public works, economic development and the development services departments.

Tulloch said that although he is retiring before he sees his goals for culture change come to full fruition, he is confident that he is leaving Chula Vista in better shape than it was when he joined the staff six years ago. Reorganizing the management team to give each department a strategic leader in addition to an operational leader, without hiring more people and paying more salaries, was a big step. Although he technically retired in December, Tulloch is still showing up at City Hall to assist with the transition.

“We needed to be a more streamlined management structure that’s much more agile, and I think that’s what we have now,” he said, adding of the future: “We want to attract the kind of people who don’t want to be average, they want to be at a high-performing organization, and we need to be able to pay them in a competitive way.”